Contagion, Culture & the Global South

Gaana Jayagopalan, Viral Vernaculars: Mediating Contagion, Care, and Communication in the Global South

Meenakshi Srihari, Talking Microbes: Why Comics?

From nineteenth-century cartoons in Punch that cast microbes as social and political actors, to manga adaptations imagining the body as an autocratic regime of cellular labour, the microbe has a surprisingly long and charged history of visual representation. This talk traces that history to ask: what does the comics form uniquely offer to stories of contagion and infection that other narrative modes cannot?

In the wake of COVID-19 and amid the widening crisis of infectious disease, Graphic Medicine -- the depiction of health in comics -- has expanded dramatically in vision, scale, and aesthetic ambition. It has moved from capturing individual, embodied experiences of illness to rendering the microbial worlds that inhabit, circulate through, and exceed the human. Drawing on Susan Squier’s concept of “porous pathography,” this talk brings together multispecies and more-than-human frameworks, employing close reading as a “microscopic” tool to think through the scaling up of microbial lives in contemporary comics, and asking what it means to narrate at a “nonhuman scale.”

I situate Graphic Medicine within a longer cultural and visual history of the microbe, arguing for comics as a generative critical site for reimagining our entanglements with nonhuman microbial life.

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Saurav Kumar Rai, Literary Depictions of Contagion in Colonial North India

There is a well-known axiom that “a single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths are statistics.” This observation holds particular relevance in the context of epidemics. Official records and archival data, though rich in quantitative detail, often fail to capture the socio-cultural and emotional dimensions of such crises. In this regard, literature becomes an indispensable source for reconstructing the social history of pandemics. It is within literary works that some of the most nuanced and enduring memories of epidemics have been preserved across generations. This paper seeks to examine select literary representations of contagion in colonial North India, particularly those that reflect the devastating impact of epidemics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It engages with the writings of prominent Hindi litterateurs such as Munshi Premchand, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, and Harishankar Parsai, among others, to explore how literature reflects as well as conserve the experiences of contagion and suffering.

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Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Unequal Burdens: COVID-19, BIPOC Communities, and Graphic Medical Narratives

Although COVID-19 is often described as a “great leveler,” it has in fact disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), exposing them to higher risks of infection and death. Building on this reality, my talk will closely read selected graphic medical narratives to highlight the lived, emotional experiences of BIPOC individuals. It draws on key concepts such as precarity, syndemics, and intersectionality to frame its analysis. The talk will demonstrate that the health outcomes of BIPOC communities are shaped by interconnected social relations, institutional structures, and enduring racial and colonial histories that continue to influence vulnerability and care.

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